Books to Watch Out For: February

“Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, an Autobiography” (Liveright), by J. G. Ballard, out February 4th. Several of J. G. Ballard’s books, including “The Kindness of Women” and “Empire of the Sun,” which was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg, contain fictionalized elements of the author’s unusual life story. Here, Ballard gives a straightforward account of his childhood in Shanghai, his family’s time in a Japanese internment camp, his education and writing career, and his years as a single parent, after the sudden death of his wife. Ballard wrote this book during a serious illness, knowing that he would probably die. It’s a warm, human complement to the work of an enigmatic author.

“House of Earth” (Infinitum Nihil), by Woody Guthrie, out February 5th. People who knew Woody Guthrie say that he was constantly writing. He left behind thousands of lyrics and poems scribbled on napkins and envelopes, but “House of Earth,” completed in 1947, was his only novel. Published now for the first time, it tells the story of a young couple trying to build a life in the Texas panhandle, during the Dust Bowl, who pin their hopes on the prospect of building an adobe hut to replace the rickety wooden shack they lived in. (Guthrie was a proponent of adobe architecture.) This unearthed piece of Americana is also the first title published Johnny Depp’s new imprint, and includes an introduction by Depp and Douglas Brinkley, which tells the story of the novel’s writing and rediscovery.

“See Now Then” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Jamaica Kincaid, out February 5th. “See Now Then” is the first novel in ten years from Jamaica Kincaid (who has published many pieces in The New Yorker). It deals with the ups and downs in the evolution of a couple’s marriage, sliding through time memory, and creating a new mythology. “See now then,” the book begins, “the dear Mrs. Sweet who lived with her husband Mr. Sweet and their two children, the beautiful Persephone and the young Heracles in the Shirley Jackson house, which was in a small village in New England.”

“Vampires in the Lemon Grove” (Knopf), by Karen Russell, out February 12th. In her first book since “Swamplandia!” Karen Russell continues to blur the boundaries between realism and fantasy, the mundane and the exotic, in a set of short stories she calls a “carefully pruned selection of imaginary gardens, assorted wildernesses that are so real because they are fantastic.” In these narratives, talismanic objects appear in a seagull’s nest, girls become silkworms, tattoos change shapes and, in the title story, a couple of vampires attempt to quench their thirst for blood by sinking their fangs into lemons.

“The Force of Things: A Marriage in War and Peace” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Alexander Stille, out February 12th. Alexander Stille has written often about politics and history, including for this magazine. “The Force of Things,” deals with his parents’ tempestuous relationship. (“One evening in May 1948,” he writes, “my mother went to a party in New York with her first husband and left it with her second, my father.”) Stille’s father was the famous journalist Ugo Stille, an Italian Jew, and his mother was a young Protestant woman from the Midwest. The stories of their families, living in very different social and political circumstances, form a survey of twentieth-century history and show how history presses on individual lives.

“To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction” (Free Press), by Phillip Lopate, out February 12th. “To Show and To Tell” is Phillip Lopate’s guide to writing creative nonfiction, a genre for which he has become a spokesperson since he edited the 1994 anthology “The Art of the Personal Essay.” His new book contains chapters on the necessity of turning yourself into a character, how to end essays, and the ethics of writing about others. Nonfiction, he says in his introduction, has the power to “open up extraordinarily ample vistas of interiority, complexity, and stylistic experimentation.” As if to prove his point, Lopate is simultaneously releasing “Portrait Inside My Head” (Free Press), a collection of personal essays on topics such as his brother, the WNYC radio personality Leonard Lopate, walking the High Line park, and his relationship to Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

“That Smell and Notes from Prison” (New Directions), by Sonallah Ibrahim, out February 19th. “I never intended to be a writer,” admitted the Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim in a 2003 interview. “I wanted to become a political activist.” As a young man in the nineteen-sixties, Ibrahim was imprisoned for his opposition to the Nasser regime. During his five years in jail, he scrawled journal entries on cigarette paper, archiving his term in a series of writings collected in “Notes from Prison.” After his release, Ibrahim wrote and published “That Smell,” a semi-autobiographical novel about a newly released political prisoner adrift in Cairo. The book, first published in 1966, was immediately banned in Egypt and censored for the following twenty years, but is now celebrated as a landmark work of modernist Arabic literature. Five decades after their composition, New Directions is publishing the two works together in a single volume.

“Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy” (Random House) by Emily Bazelon, out February 19th. Emily Bazelon, a senior editor at Slate, has written a series of stories about cyber-bullying over the past few years, including the award-winning three-part investigative piece about the death of Phoebe Prince, the fifteen-year-old girl who committed suicide in January of 2010, and the criminal prosecution of six teen-agers in connection with her death. In her scrupulously researched “Sticks and Stones,” Bazelon continues to cut through the sensationalism that often surrounds reports about bullying. She explores different facets of the problem through the stories of people who’ve been involved first-hand, and makes a case for what can be done to limit meanness and abuse among young people in an age when the problem isn’t just confined to schools but is also “on our computer screens and phones for all to see.”

“The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Paul Muldoon, out February 19th. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (and The New Yorker’s poetry editor) Paul Muldoon has published over thirty challenging collections of poetry (His counterfactual historical narrative poem “Madoc: A Mystery” has been called “the most complex poem in modern Irish literature.”) Muldoon is also a musical lyricist, and has written librettos for the opera composer Daron Hagen and song lyrics for Warren Zevon. “The Word on the Street,” is collection of short poems, many of which double as lyrics to rock songs performed by Wayside Shrines, the musicians’ collective of which Muldoon is a part.

“A History of Future Cities” (W. W. Norton & Company), by Daniel Brook, out February 25th. The New York native Daniel Brook undertakes an argument that spans countries and cultures, writing that the “unlikely sister cities” of St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai share the same ideological origin story: they are all “located in the East but purposefully built to look as if they are in the West.” Moving between the past and the present, the physical and the philosophical, gritty streets and ivory towers, Brook enumerates the connections between these metropolises.

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